


Completion

by RavenDreamer



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, Gen, Glendower hijinks, TRK spoilers, sorry for the angst, soul searching
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-07
Updated: 2016-05-07
Packaged: 2018-06-07 00:25:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 900
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6776797
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RavenDreamer/pseuds/RavenDreamer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once, years or months or aeons ago, Gansey had mused: What will happen to me when I find him? Who will I become?</p><p>He didn't feel finished. He didn't feel completed.</p><p>He felt-</p><hr/><p>Set before and around the epilogue of trk: Gansey realises there's still something he has to do before leaving Henrietta.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Completion

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little something I needed to write after processing the end of trk.
> 
> My first fic in this fandom (and on this site, whoop whoop) and un-beta'd, so sorry if this is horribly ooc or whatever.

_ Egypt! _ Henry had shouted gleefully, scattering travel brochures wildly across the pool table back in Monmouth.  _ Zimbabwe, Maylaysia! And Venezuela, if Sargent so desires! _

Blue's heart had sung with it:  _ Graduation, traveling, pygmy tyrants, something more!  _ And Gansey had rejoiced:  _ Gap year, release from Congress and college apps and Gansey-ness, ley lines and magic, did somewhere kings still sleep? _

It was something, he felt, the trip, even if it couldn't be everything. Nothing, he felt, could be  _ everything _ : could completely ease the ache that Glendower's centuries-ago death had started inside him, could lay to rest the knowledge of exactly how much Noah and Cabeswater and the others had sacrificed for him and his stupid, noble, futile quest. He was no longer kept awake with longing for Glendower, but his insomnia lingered. He was no longer searching, but he couldn't stop waiting for that moment of finding.

Once, years or months or aeons ago, Gansey had mused:  _ What will happen to me when I find him? Who will I become? _

He didn't feel finished. He didn't feel completed.

He felt-

Nights alone in Monmouth, he'd jolt awake at one or two or five am, and steal outside to the waiting Pig, each experience layered with the memories of the thousand other times he'd done this.

Or he'd wander through the dusty lower floor of Monmouth Manufacturing, underneath his miniature cardboard Henrietta, and lose himself in the regret of never fully clearing out the building, of leaving this and so many other things unfinished.

Or, sometimes, he'd call Fox Way, reveling in the knowledge that it didn't matter now who picked up the phone at the other end, that this didn't have to be a secret, something obscurely shameful. And, mostly, Blue's sleep-heavy voice at the other end did still something in him, recalibrate his sense of rightness in the world. But Blue was busy these days, studying and waitressing and preparing for graduation, and it wore on him that she needed these predawn hours more than he did.

The pulse of the ley line beat in him now, relic of Cabeswater’s sacrifice.

Maybe leaving Henrietta  _ was _ the key. Graduating Aglionby, handing over the keys to Monmouth, leaving the memory of Glendower's bones behind.

Spring shaded into summer. Persuaded by Blue and the women of Fox Way, Gansey took part in a church watch for the second time in his life. (Or lives.) He couldn't see anything and neither could Blue, but the warm and empty April night felt like a promise, and when they packed up at two am, after placing the flowers they'd brought on Noah's grave, Gansey and Blue stood in the ruined churchyard and kissed - also for the second time. Neither of them was going to die this year. Blue was no longer cursed, or Gansey was no longer cursable.

Gansey's heart soared and soared.

The longing came back, though, as summer deepened and graduation loomed. His last Latin lesson in Borden house, Ronan nostalgically scrawling his last joke on the greying whiteboard having made it through the year out of a desire to prove Adam's laughing scepticism wrong. Celebrating Blue’s last day at Mountain View with Maura, the Grey Man and  _ the best tuna fish in town!  _ (and, later that night, with the other boys and a bottle or two of maybe-dreamt champagne). Accepting his Aglionby diploma along with Adam, Henry, Ronan and the rest of them, pulling off his uniform jumper for the last time. They were none of them raven boys anymore.

Gansey celebrated happily and genuinely, the right mix of joy and anticipation and nostalgia, but in the late-midnight hours when he still woke up with the moon on his face and shaking, all he could think of was  _ Noah Noah Noah _ .

Or,  _ Glendower Glendower Glendower _ .

The day before Adam left for college and Gansey, Blue and Henry left for Venezuela, he came to a decision.

Glendower's tomb was different in the daytime; robbed of its urgency, the cave entrance looked little more than a hole in the someone’s basement. He climbed down into it anyway. Hoping.

Dashing off a text to Henry to verify his entrance time, he switched on his torch and set off, down a tunnel that seemed suspiciously shorter than the last time he'd used it. Maybe his theory about unworthiness had some truth in it after all. He took a dozen pictures with his phone of the raven carvings at the tomb entrance, then carefully scraped open the door and walked in.

Glendower, in his slowly rusting armour and helmet, was still a skeleton; Gansey did not allow himself to acknowledge that he'd hoped otherwise. He breathed in the weighted and dusty air in the tomb, savouring the last taste of a tomb that belonged to him and his friends and no-one else.

Then, scrambling out of the cave and waving his phone around for signal, he dialed the number for the local heritage society, informing them of a new and exciting historical find in rural Delaplane, with probable links to a certain medieval Welsh king.

He ended the call. _ Remembered _ . In his head, Noah's voice whispered again:  _ Don't throw it away _ .

Gansey turned his back on the blackness between the warped floorboards, looking instead through cracked glass windows towards the hills where Ronan said he was going to re-seed Cabeswater. Nothing was impossible. “I was never going to.”


End file.
